Cheese Art Online
by Tim Bustin
Summary: The world of Sword Art Online might just be a bit brighter with the two lads from Yorkshire hanging around, Wallace and Gromit. Camembere-lieve it? Well read it right here!


On that fateful day, 10,000 players across Japan got caught inside the world's first VR MMO RPG, Sword Art Online, with no way to log out, and where death in the game meant death in real life. The idea of dying was tangible, like a strongly ripened blue Stilton. A stench of mould and disease.

Thousands died, within just a month. Outside the 'safe zone' monsters lurked in every cave; gangs of players waited in ambush to tackle, loot, and murder less experienced ones; through sheer fear and inadequacy, players starved. The monsters were 10 ft tall, terrifyingly fast; money was scarce unless you risked your life. And once again, Stilton smells really bad.

And that's how this place smelt.

There was a player, powering through the game, however. He was a dark soul, but maybe a leader at heart, with a heart as large as everyone assumed it to be dark.

"Wow," Kirito said, as he healed himself with a crystal from his personal stores, "how did you manage to tame that beast?"

"Oh, no lad," chuckled Wallace, patting Gromit heavily on the head, "that's just me mutt. Well say hello, Gromit."

Gromit, the yellow dog, rolled his eyes, and raised an eyebrow, that sort of seemed to say "Well now, I'm quite a fair bit smarter than this dopey, flat-footed human."

The tragedy! These two Brits had been in Japan that fateful day, travelling across the world in search for rare and exotic cheeses. The game's lure was too strong. Virtual cheese, Gromit! They plonked on their NerveGear headsets like everyone else, and entered a strange world that wanted to kill them at every turn. Thankfully, as it turned out, Wensleydale made an excellent remedy for a sword gash. And brie, rubbed properly onto the body, really seeped poison out of the body like there was nothing to it. Cheddar was particularly well suited to any sort of ailment, and of course, was simply the most delicious.

"Spot of bother, eh?" Wallace would cry across the battlefield, the raid party down three men as spitting goblins slobbered and slavered and gnawed away at the group. "Oh, I wouldn't eat them like that," Wallace muttered to himself, all Yorkshire-like, "not without a sprinkling of Parmesan. Not to worry, lads! Come here, I'm your healer!"

And so, self-proclaimed inventors Wallace and Gromit set up Cheeses Wheel 'N' Heal, with the mission of finding strange new cheeses and saving lives across the land. Soon the players made it past the first floor; and then the next; then more and more. It was all thanks to Wallace, who dealt the cheeses and dealt with the players, and Gromit, who sourced the cheeses, and prepared them, and set up an intricate contraption that launched them high into the air, via a big rubber hand that would sort of pick it up and throw it, which was in turn connected to various cogs and wheels, all meaning that the cheeses landed in the battlefield wherever they were needed. It was all designed, built, and rather dangerously operated, by himself.

And Gromit wasn't happy with that arrangement.

One day, in the 25th floor's boss room, where soldiers were dropping like flies and the Army guild was suffering heavy blows, Gromit frowned in a way that seemed to say "Just hang on a second, Wallace. You're a bit of a failed inventor and I'm doing all the heavy work. I deserve a bit more than a pat on the head, don't I?". Unfortunately, Wallace's back was turned on Gromit when Gromit was frowning in this way, as he rather unhelpfully shouted useless advice to the soldiers screaming and lying on the floor beneath the monster's blades, and bursting into pixels every now and then with a satisfying 'pshhhh" noise, and so Gromit, in all the chaos, just decided to run forwards very quickly and butt Wallace off the side of the walkway, into the depths of un-rendered darkness below, where he quickly shattered into pixels, crying "Gordon Bennett!".

All alone now, and as the only proprietor of valuable healing cheeses in the whole game, Gromit had the newly formed Knights of the Blood Oath in the palm of his paw, with a frown that said "Now you listen here; are you really going to mess with me? You need me far more than I need you." Of course, in reality Gromit was terrified another player would soon copy his way of mass farming cheeses, and so he had to grow his empire quick. As the floors fell past, it was him, on a bed of different cheeses, rising higher and higher, whilst his competitors fell. Laughing Coffin, I hear you say? Just a front. Slower progress on the higher floors? Well… that just meant higher demand for cheeses. Marketing campaigns soon existed, claiming the game's naturally occurring healing crystals actually slowly lowered your max HP over time.

Gromit was crafty. Gromit was silent, but smart. He listened, and he learned. One day, his right hand man, an innocent enough fella by the name of Klein whose guild led the harvests, asked "Hey, it's none of my business and all, but this is a lot of money we're making. I mean, a serious amount, and we're just not putting it to good use. Wasn't this meant to all be about helping the players?"

Gromit put down his papers from behind his desk. He gave a long, cold, hard frown, that sort of seemed to say "Listen, Klein. I'm not in the cheese wheeling business or the cheese healing business. I'm in the empire making business."

But Gromit didn't see his own demise. Years spent evading his enemies, and years gorging on cheese. Gromit had known, from his poor diet his master had fed him, that long ago his arteries were too far gone. Cheese was not dog food, let's be real. And the cheese here wasn't real, but in some hospital he lay, getting weaker every day, as he ran free and wild in this world like no dog ever had or could. Did you know they don't clean the pus out of cows milk before making it into cheese? Or that cheese can be more addictive than morphine? Talk about Breaking Bad. Explain's Wallace's obsession, for sure.

Gromit looked below, out of the window from his high-rise office, and saw Aincrad in its splendour. He felt like he could see 70 floors down, to the simple Town of Beginnings, and to the Field of Cheeses where it had all begun. He missed Wallace. The man had never made his mark. But Gromit had made his. He'd harvested the fields. He'd made the contraptions. He'd killed his master, to rise up. He'd killed Kirito in the same way when the nosey goodytwoshoes was going to tell on him to the surviving players on Floor 25 that day. Overpowered git. He had taken two whole nudges to fall off that walkway, when most people, basically everyone, only took one good shove (how do you even get to be that OP? Thank god he'd been taken out by a plasticine dog).

He'd crushed his opposition, bribed the guilds, burnt new fields of cheese to the ground, slaughtered his enemies, and won. Suddenly, he clutched at his heart.

Somewhere, if there was an afterlife, or an escape from this world after all, Wallace was there, and he was laughing, laughing at all of this - much in the same way Patrick Star might watch a debate over economic theories for an evening of late-night entertainment - and he was munching on some cheddar cheese with some crackers.

/

**Note: **Hi, I write freelance, professionally. Check out my darker SAO one-shot Angel on this site, or, if you actually enjoyed that, leave a comment, and find all my works at timbustinwriting

Image credit: Flickr / cogdogblog


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